Day -01 - Friday, 11/08/24

 Today is the last day before our cruise begins.  I didn't sleep well overnight due to the heat, and when I finally did, I slept soundly until Angela stirred me at 9am.  With our breakfast time ending at 9:30am, I scurried to get ready and we were in the breakfast room at 9:20am.  The included breakfast here is quite good with scrambled eggs, sausage, waffles or pancakes, yoghurt, hard boiled eggs, fruit drinks, coffee and tea.


After breakfast we headed out to walk a bit over a mile towards the port to do some shopping, have lunch, and enjoy the over 80°f heat.  Along the way we saw lots of little lizards scurrying into the greenery for protection.  Shopping went well and I found some cargo shorts and Angela found some clothing articles as well.  We stopped in at the McDonald's for our last meal at one of these for a while.  That lead to one of the major reasons why we loving cruising and international travel: it broadens our perspective on the world and helps us understand ourselves better.


We were seated next to two couples and finally at an appropriate time I asked them if they were heading out on a cruise.  They indicated that they just disembarked from the Rotterdam that morning.  I then asked how did you end up here?  They were from Canada with a night flight home, so they secured a day room at the Rodeway Inn where we are staying also.  They then, like us, walked over here to do some shopping.  We then learned that one of the couples were long time HAL cruisers and we compared notes about cruising and ships we had sailed on and favorite destinations.  Angela then asked them what they thought of the recent election.  The man in the second couple then proceeded to share his perspective on why he thought it was fantastic that DJT won the election.  We went back and forth chatting about it for quite awhile.  I'll not share details in this blog, because I want to keep politics out of it, but I will say it was a healthy interchange of ideas and done in a civil manner.  They needed to leave and we stayed at the restaurant for a bit longer before walking back to the hotel.

My little Hobbit



Dinner (we split everything)


Back at the hotel, I took a nap while Angela swam.  I woke up in time for dinner, so walked next door to Marina 84 and thoroughly enjoyed a dinner of Korean style BBQ ribs and a salad.  I've had them here before.  We walked back to our room and our key cards wouldn't work.  Replacement cards wouldn't work also.  So maintenance was called and the fellow eventually determined that the card reader was bad and the whole lock assembly would have to be replaced.  This took about 2 hours, and he offered to have us change rooms, but we declined as there was too much to pack up.  In the end, the lock got fixed!

I saw on my Marine Traffic app that the Volendam left the Freeport, Bahamas shipyard at around 8:30pm EST and it should be here around 3:30am.  We should be good to go on our next adventure tomorrow.  We're booked on the 11am shuttle (free), but we can't board until 1pm.  That's okay as there's going to be lots of congestion at the port with a full set of ships due in.  I'll post a picture of the map tomorrow.

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